Dr. Sarnikar asks this question on our first assignment for KM class:

What is knowledge sharing as opposed to knowledge application?

I reply thus, with an example Toby will love:

Knowledge sharing is a deliberate effort to spread organizational knowledge among members. Knowledge application seeks to spread the fruits of that knowledge while not necessarily transferring the knowledge itself.

For instance, when I hired a new assistant to join me in running an oral interp contest, I helped that assistant learn how to perform the diagonal section generation manually. That assistant can now generate sections for oral interp rounds and explain the logic the diagonal process uses. If I stepped out and left my assistant to run the tournament, he could train an assistant of his own to do the same task. That’s knowledge sharing.

Now my assistant and I could encapsulate diagonal section generation in a VBA Excel macro. At that point, we could ask a new assistant to generate sections simply by hitting the macro button on the tournament spreadsheet. At that point, we would be applying knowledge, giving the new assistant the ability to carry out the task made possible by our knowledge of diagonal section generation. We would not, however, be sharing our knowledge: pressing the macro button does not equip our new assistant with the knowledge necessary to teach others to generate sections without the spreadsheet.